It started with their wedding rings. A week after Dereck’s went down the kitchen drain, Joanne’s went in after it. Those fuckers just slipped off, they guessed. It was strange since just a month before, the rings went on with ease at the altar, resting under the plump curve of their fingers. But just add some hard Georgia water and the off-brand Dawn and they were nearly jumping down the pipe of their own volition. Joanne found hers once at the Piggly Wiggly she worked at, in the mayo tub at the deli counter. Dereck found his in his garage’s shop vac. They went to get them tattooed one day to forego future losses, but Dereck was squeamish and ran out as soon as the machine started up. 

Dereck’s drinking had got serious around then. The night he got a DUI, his sister, Anne brought Joanne to the Petty Fair police station to get him. In the parking lot, Anne said something real smart like, “I knew you were a drunk, but I didn’t think you’d put the car at risk like that.” She was talking about the gold ’73 Chevy Malibu that Dereck inherited from their dad. He shared it with Joanne. Dereck had also inherited the family garage business. He shared it with Anne. Joanne told him she forgave him as soon as they got in the car to go home. He kissed her with his warm whiskey mouth and didn’t put his seatbelt on until they pulled out of the lot. “How did all this happen, Dereck?” Joanne asked him. Dereck told her he just had bad luck. He looked up at the night sky and saw a meteor from the Perseid shower. He thought about telling Anne to pull over so they could watch them together like they used to do. But it didn’t feel like the right time.
When they’d first started dating five years before, Dereck took Joanne out to a field beyond the town of Petty Fair and into the next county over. He’d found it on a back road once when he was 15 and always dreamed of taking a girl out there. They laid against the hood of the Malibu and watched the Perseids fly across the midnight summer sky, leaving behind shimmers of dust. That was the first night they made love. He kissed her body all over, tickling the curves of her waist and hips, wandering through what felt like silk. 

From then on, they spent their days with their hands intertwined and they spent their nights with their bodies in the same way. Back then, Joanne still liked drinkin with Dereck and she always outlasted him in pickle back shots. One time she got up on a roof at Kyle Bonningdale’s house party and took her top off so all of East Petty Fair could see her tits. Dereck yelled at her to come down and she yelled back for him to come up, and Joanne won. They woke up the next morning with the sun beatin down on them so hard, Dereck had a sunburn line in the shape of Joanne’s arm wrapped around him.

They were married now. Sometimes things like that get stale when left out too long. Joanne wanted them to get their own place, so she started pulling doubles at the deli counter and being home less. Dereck would get frustrated around the time they usually had sex, and he’d have to masturbate to keep from goin crazy. Anytime Joanne wanted it after work, she was always too late. Dereck would try really hard to get it up for her, but it always ended with him rolling over silently and Joanne telling him that it was okay and these things happen to people sometimes. After Joanne went to sleep, he’d go to their garage and drink. Joanne caught him one time out there, her eyes squinting in the doorway from the harsh fluorescent lights. Dereck told her it was cause he couldn’t sleep and that he’d be back in bed soon. Joanne wanted to believe these things were not a problem. She hemmed and hawed about it during the day, making up reasons for Dereck’s behavior. But Dereck saw things differently. He knew there was a problem. And he was scared shitless that problem was him.

One day, Dereck was flippin through radio stations in the shop’s office, drinking dark liquor from a paper bag. He landed on the Christian station, 106.9 The Light. It was a sermon about god wantin married people to have babies, that it’s what marriage is meant for, and that more married people not having babies is why America is the shape it’s in. He’d heard that message before at Mount Fair Baptist when he was 8 years old, back when his grandma would force him into a pressed dress shirt and drag him to the lord’s house, cause “Your daddy sure as hell ain’t goin to.” After a few Sundays there, Dereck realized he didn’t believe in a god much. Especially one that made such a wonderful thing as the female clitoris and then told you it’s a sin to admire it.

But, for some reason, that radio sermon convinced Dereck that what was wrong with his and Joanne’s marriage was that they didn’t have kids. Dereck pitched the idea to Joanne when she got off. She said that, well, she’d always enjoyed looking at the baby clothes section in Walmart and that sometimes she daydreamed about singing lullabies to a daughter with curly hair. “So maybe it’s time,” she said. Joanne cut back her hours so she could be home more, and her and Dereck started makin love on a timer.

Around then, the garage went to suffering something awful. Dereck came in drunk a lot and once accosted a customer who accused them of putting the wrong oil in his truck. Dereck said it ran weird because the truck was a Ford and Ford stands for Found on Road Dead, but the man didn’t take kindly to that and told him he was gonna leave a bad Yelp review. Dereck said he didn’t know what Yelp was, but he soon found out because the whole town started leaving em. “I would give this place zero stars if I could.” Dereck thought his place was worth at least three.

Anne did the money stuff for the business, and one day, she said it wasn’t looking good. “You need to get your act together,” she said. “You’re drunk right now, aren’t you?” she asked. “Go the fuck home right now,” she demanded. Dereck just stood at the water cooler with his arm propped up, filling up and drinking from a paper cup over and over until it was nothing but a sheet of sketch paper. “I mean it, Dereck!” she said. She started scolding him and waving her hands around real big. She said that one a these days she was gonna make him a deal for his half of the garage and he wouldn’t be able to pass it up because he’d be too busy pawnin shit so he could buy bottom shelf vodka, or some such. She said she wasn’t gonna stand and watch Dereck destroy the business their dad built twenty years ago. 

Dereck got right angry about that statement. “When the fuckin cows come home,” he said. “Dad left this place to me cause he wanted me to have it!” He said she was bluffing and that she couldn’t go against their father’s wishes like that. Anne assured him that she could. Dereck started yellin like his top had just popped and kicked over the water cooler. The jug wobbled off the broken cooling system and fell to the floor with a thunk. Half the office flooded. Joanne, screaming like a frizzled mess, banished Dereck from stepping foot back in the garage and told him to expect an invoice for the carpet. 

Dereck brought his anger home, but it was all bottled back up. “Bad luck. I just got bad luck,” he kept repeating, pacing the kitchen floor back and forth. Joanne tried to talk to him, but she couldn’t get a word in. She took the glass of warm whiskey from his hand and sat it on the stove. “Now, you listen to me,” she said, “You’re gonna stop this business. I done put up with it for too long.” She told him that if they were gonna start havin babies that he needed to straighten up. She told him to pour out all of his bottles and cans. Dereck did.

With loads of time on his hands now, Dereck started watching a lot of conspiracy videos about NASA. He took up a dabs habit in place of liquor and would curl up on the couch with his bubbling rig from noon to six, surrounded by dirty plates with dried cheese and crumbs on them. “Sure, the moon landing was fake, that’s old news,” a podcast host would say from his phone, “What we should be worried about now is why we haven’t sent people to Mars yet. Like real humans, not robots. Wake up, people! They’re hiding something!” Dereck started believing that maybe it was god they were hiding. What god, he didn’t know, but if his suspicions were true, then the stars must have been determining his luck all along. He was a Leo, and he read once that Leos are usually destined for greatness, but obviously he couldn’t fulfill that destiny because NASA had a force field up there, or some such. He talked about it a lot to Joanne, and pretty soon he began to feel alien to her, like he was on another plane of existence but not in an interesting way. “Go live in the stars if you love them so much,” she’d say. 

Joanne could only stand to be in the same room with him if they were going to fuck. It wasn’t making love anymore. It was just like dogs in heat. She thought maybe that’d be their saving grace. All the fucking would finally give them a child and they could love again, or some such. Things weren’t destined to go like that. Joanne had three miscarriages. The first one kept her bedridden of a broken heart for three days. She studied the purple pansies on the bed sheet, of which there were 26, which was how old she was. She kept some of the blood from her dead child on her inner thigh to remind herself that the baby was still hers and was still real. Dereck said it was his bad luck did it. 

During the third miscarriage, Joanne had to wrap toilet paper around her panties to soak up the blood. She should have kept the adult diapers in her cabinet from the last miscarriage. Her hopes had been too high. Dereck thought throwin em out would tip the scales, would “Appease the law of attraction,” and they would have a bouncing baby come. When Joanne looked into the toilet, she had that aching feeling that her womb was always gonna be empty. She took her wedding ring off and set it on the bathroom sink. When it gets lost again, she thought, I ain’t gonna go lookin for it.

Joanne couldn’t have that daughter with curly hair. She could only have an alien husband. She moved into the spare bedroom and Dereck cried about it. She told him she just needed space. She switched to night shifts at the deli, so she didn’t have to see him moping around in a bath robe all the time smoking dabs, but the Piggly Wiggly said they didn’t have night shifts for the deli, so she started doing stock. It hurt Joanne’s back lifting all the sacks of flour and sugar and no one ever offered to help because it was a bunch of men and they all thought she got what she signed up for. 

Joanne would come home at 4 am and hear Dereck watching porn in his room, full volume. For some reason, it would turn her on, the type of feral and angry urge that Mount Fair Baptist kept tracts about in its entryway. She’d go take a shower and try to touch herself, but she’d just cry and cry instead. Anne convinced them to try therapy, but it went over about as well as it could for two people who’d stopped trying altogether. Dereck would yell, “Well least I never tried to beat you!” And Joanne would yell back, “Oh, look at you! World’s Greatest Husband, “Dereck Reems: Least He Never Beat His Wife!”

The night of their last session, Joanne asked for them to separate for good, which was a nice way to avoid the word divorce, but it was loaded all the same. She said maybe it should be Dereck to leave the house since he’s got a sister right in town and Joanne’s parents lived three hours away, after all. Dereck said okay. He wanted to be chivalrous, so he let Joanne keep the Malibu “for now.” He packed his moping robe and his dab rig and took a cab to Anne’s house to beg for a spot on the couch. Anne refused him at the door. “I ain’t having you around my kids, Dereck,” she said, “I don’t trust you anymore.” She sent him on to a Motel 6 and paid for him a couple nights.

 

Joanne started feeling like a new woman. She did so well with working stock that she was promoted to night shift manager. She bought a crock pot, started planting pansies in the front yard, and went out to the movies all by herself. She started buying all the different kinds of Kraft mac and cheese that the Piggly Wiggly carried, all of them except the kind with bacon bits. Dereck had only ever wanted the kind with bacon bits. She called Anne on the phone one afternoon and told her how liberated she felt. She told her she got a vibrator and Anne said that may have been TMI, but Joanne didn’t care. She just needed the whole world to know that she didn’t miss Dereck Reems one bit.

But Dereck missed Joanne awful. And poor Anne had to put up with him, too. When she would ignore his calls, he’d cab to her house and stand on her front porch til she came out. It broke Anne’s heart at first, but eventually it became tiring and noxious, as Dereck was wont to be. He’d started drinking again, but worse. Anne had to bail him out a few times, she’d therapy him on the way back home, which basically just sounded like, “Joanne’s not gonna take you back, Dereck. She’s not that fucking stupid.” Dereck thought Anne was just doing what good sisters do. 

On the way back home from the monthly inventory shift at the grocery store, Joanne was hummin an old tune. She didn’t realize at first where she got it from but thought real hard on it and remembered it was a Patsy Cline song. Patsy was Dereck’s favorite singer. She felt a pang in her heart. Across the sky near the horizon ahead of her, Joanne saw a flash. It was summer, it was the meteors. Another flew across, seeming bright enough to light up her eyes. “Goddammit, Dereck,” she whispered. She did miss the fool. She wondered if he was watchin too. 

As Joanne drove through an intersection, she caught too late that it was a red light. The paster of Mount Fair Baptist came in from the left goin 65 and hit her. Joanne didn’t die on impact. She spent the next two weeks silent and still, lost in unconscious thoughts that faded more each day. And then she faded too, dying next to her parents at 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Dereck wasn’t there. 

He’d come to the hospital the night of the wreck and told her he was gonna check himself into rehab so he’d be tip-top for her when she woke up. Rehab was easy knowing he was doin it for her. There was a poetry group at the center and his group therapist thought it would be a good outlet. Dereck picked it up quick, he realized he had a lot to say. He kept a journal for Joanne, writin love notes and I’m sorrys. On the day she died, before he learned about her death, Dereck wrote a short poem.

 

From North and flyin,
a speck like dust,
a heap like steel.

​

For you, I’m dyin,
a night like rust,
a kiss I’ll steal.

​

Joanne’s mom called him at 7 and gave him the news. 
Dereck always had the back pocket idea that maybe he was completely dead wrong about all the star stuff. He swore he wasn’t crazy but maybe he’d just overcompensated for his lack of purpose and looked somewheres else for it. But his back pocket had been right all along. As Joanne’s mom started talkin about funeral stuff, he realized he didn’t know anything in the bucket to how the universe really worked. Dereck thought he might drown in that bucket, with nothin but the mirage of Joanne’s face at the surface.

She wasn’t shown at the funeral; they kept her hidden in the casket. Dereck was in the front left holding her as they carried her to the grave. No one wanted her cremated. It felt like she’d been through enough already.